Oliver Hailey; Successful Regional Playwright, TV Writer

Oliver Hailey, who graduated from the Yale School of Drama 30 years ago and created a series of plays that made him one of the most successful regional playwrights of modern times, has died.

His wife, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey--author of “A Woman of Independent Means” and other novels--said Sunday that her husband of 32 years died Saturday at their home in Studio City.

He died in the cozy, tree-fronted house they had occupied since 1967. Members of his family--including his two daughters, mother and brother--were with him when he died.

Hailey was 60 and had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for 10 years but died of liver cancer, his wife said.

Although Hailey never achieved the national acclaim of some of his contemporaries, he was among a handful of famous regional playwrights.

Although he liked to joke that more of his plays (three) had closed in New York after a single night than any other author, the same was not true in Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities.

Here and elsewhere his “Who’s Happy Now,” “Father’s Day,” “For the Use of the Hall,” “The Father” (an adaptation of Strindberg), “Where She Goes Nobody Knows” and several more were almost continuously in production.

His screen and television scenarios also enjoyed lingering triumphs--episodes of “McMillan and Wife,” “Just You and Me Kid,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and more, plus “Sidney Shorr,” on which the series “Love Sydney” was based. That effort brought Hailey an Emmy nomination and a Writer’s Guild award.

His most autobiographical play, “Who’s Happy Now,” took 10 years to develop, he told the Contemporary Dramatists.

“My plays are primarily the attempt to take a serious theme and deal with it comedically. . . . I try not to start writing until I have found a comic point of view for the material,” he said.

It was the comic angle that he waited for as he pondered “Who’s Happy Now,” developed from the Angst of his youth.

The themes of his work ran from the dichotomies involved in the reality-stained world of life to the imagined realities of life as it is acted in “Hey You, Light Man,” first produced in 1962.

“There had been nothing particularly funny about my childhood, and yet I felt that to tell the story with a comic perspective was to put upon the stage a story too similar to many that had been seen before.”

At the other end of his lengthy body of work was “The World and His Wife,” his last drama, which had its initial reading at the Tamarind Theater in Hollywood on Sunday, a day after his death.

That play, Elizabeth Hailey said, is a story of the world--past, present and future--as seen through the eyes of a man and his wife.

Beyond Hailey’s contributions to the theater, he was recognized as friend and mentor to many young playwrights, some of whom went on to greater commercial successes than his own.

For years, he ran two units--the Cast in Hollywood and the Back Alley Theater in Van Nuys--that spawned several writers.

Born in Texas, Hailey graduated from the University of Texas and then the Yale University School of Drama in 1962. After Air Force service, he worked on newspapers in Dallas, where he met his wife. They lived and wrote in New York City, coming to Los Angeles in 1967 for his production of “Who’s Happy Now,” part of the premiere year of the Mark Taper Forum.

That play later was shown on PBS.

Aside from his wife and daughters, Kendall and Brooke, Hailey is survived by a brother, Thomas, and mother, HallieMae.

A memorial service is scheduled Feb. 14 at 4 p.m. at the Met Theater on Oxford Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The family is asking that contributions be sent to the USC Department of Neurology, Parkinson’s Research Fund, 1510 San Pablo Street, Suite 615, Los Angeles, 90033.